“
In a way, [making the act of crying a goal for video games] is the logical culmination of a misguided emotional authoritarianism in some strands of game thinking. Instead of worrying about the kinds of emotion a game can or cannot induce in - or even demand of - the player, we ought to be more concerned about how games construct a rich and deep world in which unpredictable and variable emotions will arise naturally.
from Steven Poole’s column in EDGE 214, May 2010
I will forgive Steven for dragging out “rich and deep world”, because I am with him for the entirety of his column. There is so much more to experience in a video game, like…I don’t know…places you could never visit in “real life”. And in light of recent attacks on Alan Wake for not being “scary”, or how the horror genre in video games can be “fixed”, is fear not an emotion that is worth pursuing in players?
Like Steven Poole, I am having a hard time figuring out where this criteria for video game’s cultural legitimacy came from.
